The invention relates to visualization techniques for visualizing biological information. It is customary to organize biological relations as one or more pathways or networks. An exemplary system is disclosed in Hass, L et al: “DiscoveryLink, a system for integrated access to life science data sources”, IBM Systems Journal 40, p. 489-511. The system described in this article exhibits certain shortcomings, however.
Historically, the decomposition of biology into different disciplines was necessary to tackle the complexity of life science systems by reducing the degree of complexity down to the most basic level. With the advent of systems biology, such separation of biology is increasingly becoming artificial. But the long history of separating biology to different disciplines hampers attempts to integrate biological information. For instance, different databases often use mutually incompatible naming conventions and vocabularies. Attempts to solve such problems have been based on ontologies and semantic web technologies, such as XML (eXtendible Markup Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework).
The ontology-based technologies attack the incompatibility problem at a relatively low level and only solves problems caused by the different naming conventions and vocabularies. The ontology-based technologies are unable to solve problems relating to problems caused by different context, ie, entities that may appear closely related in one context may be further apart in another. Another problem of known visualization systems is that they require extensive knowledge of the various software tools and databases.